evolutionary psychology

[evolcon]

Well, here's the thing that puzzles me.  Evolutionary psychology doesn't state, in any way shape or form - that we're simply apes with language.  Evolutionary psychology is the contention that we (we, as in, our mental states or native apprehensions) are at least the sum of all of our parts.  We don't think the things we do because we can talk.  We talk about those things the way we do because we're the kind of animal that we are.  

We'd talk and hear a different way if we were different - and, as a matter of fact we do.  The tiny bones in our middle ear have been put under selective pressure by the languages we speak.  Or by something else, which just so happens to broadly correlate to language groups.  We aren't really sure, it;s a best guess - because we're a best guessing kind of animal (add that to the list).

Sure, we're apes with speech, but that relies on novel adaptations to neural control over vocal tract muscles.  The way we speak and the way we hear influence the way we think - and both of those things are in turn influenced by some physical and inheritable structure.  More than this, our base apprehension of life is as a terrestrial bipedal mammal with opposable thumbs.  That covers alot.  We would expect our views and our speech about the world as we see it to be vstly different if we had..for example...just the eight fingers..no thumbs.  If we could fly.  If we could breath water.  If our forelimbs were occupied with walking.  On and on.  There's no simple about it, no one thing about it.  Simple passed -all- life by billions of years ago.  The difference between our animal mind and other animal minds, we suspect, is as different as we are as animals.  Grunting out a sound that other animals recognize as denoting "dad" is something that alot of animals do.  

Even plants talk to each other.  

We probably don't disagree as much as you imagine, but you've reduced a broad and open field to jingoism with that statement (and..fwiw, that's something that evolutionary psychologists would just -love- to be able to explain..why we do that).  If I had to guess, your statement that we're just animals with language is meant to be taken in comparison to some other claim - but I don't know what that claim is - and there's nothing in your speech to clue me in to what that's supposed to be - meanwhile..outside of that context..the phrase is either a deepity or demonstrably false. We do and are alot more than language.  We've taught other apes languages that they can use to communicate with us.  Didn't make any of them human.

Human 

 As for Apes learning language, you might look at the criticism by linguists like Pinker, Chomsky and others